The Antagonist as Liberator

By Amos Elon

Published: January 26, 1997

I WAS BROWSING THROUGH THE shelves of a large Berlin bookstore recently when an elegantly dressed woman rushed in and asked for four copies (''gift-wrapped, please'') of ''Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,'' by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. She appeared to be a regular customer. As the saleswoman wrapped the books, the woman told her that she was buying copies for her two sons and her two married daughters. With so much idle talk after reunification of ''We are finally able to turn the page,'' she said, it was proper that the ''past'' was in the news again and a hot issue on all the television talk shows. This Goldhagen, she pronounced, was ''kolossal.''

''Yes,'' said the saleswoman, ''and he is so handsome and so sincere too! I can't stand those groaning old professors who attack him!''

Goldhagen's controversial book had just gone into its ninth printing. It was No. 2 on the German best-seller list (having been No. 1 for weeks). In little more than four months it had sold nearly 160,000 copies, five times as many as Hitler's ''Mein Kampf'' did in the first four years after its publication in 1925.

No other history book in recent memory has sold as well or raised such furor as this quickly translated 700-page expanded version of a Harvard doctoral thesis filled with gruesome detail and repetitious rhetoric. The validity of Goldhagen's thesis is not under discussion in this article. What is more fascinating is the debate it has generated in Germany both among and between young and old.

Months before the German translation came out, German newspapers and magazines bitterly attacked the American original, which was known here primarily through news reports. Outrage came mostly from the center-left. The highbrow, mass-circulation liberal weekly Die Zeit ran a front-page editorial asking, ''Were All Germans Guilty?'' To this were added excerpts quoting Goldhagen's radical thesis that, in effect, they were. Die Zeit alone, in eight subsequent editions, devoted page after page to reviews of the book by leading German historians and political scientists. Other papers followed suit, decrying Goldhagen's ''chutzpah'' and ''racism.'' Others claimed it was simply a ''bad book.'' The most common view was that the book was not up to the ''latest'' insights of historical research.

Nearly all of Goldhagen's critics denied his main charge, that a century before Hitler's rise to power German anti-Semitism had been more virulent (''eliminationist'') than that of other European countries. The long series in Die Zeit was closed by Marion Grafin Donhof, who confessed that, as publisher of Die Zeit, she was sorry that her paper had raised so much fuss about this ''dubious'' book. Moreover, warned the doyenne of liberal postwar journalism, Goldhagen's book ''might revive the more or less silenced anti-Semitism'' in Germany. A Munich newspaper, Suddeutsche Zeitung, sharply took her to task for this last remark. Josef Joffe, the paper's foreign editor, while granting that Goldhagen's generalizations were exaggerated, accused his critics of exaggerating as well. They were protesting too much. Their tone was shrill and contemptuous and might reflect badly concealed insecurities and feelings of repressed guilt.

WHILE THIS PRE-PUBLICATION DEBATE WAS AT ITS PEAK EARLY last June -- and before Goldhagen himself toured German cities to promote German sales and face his main critics in dramatic televised debates -- I happened to be present during a conversation between a woman in her 40's, an art historian, and an old friend of hers, a German Jewish historian. What took place I shall not soon forget. Her father, a lay Lutheran priest, had been jailed and tortured under the Nazis. Like many of her generation, she had been a leftist in her student days, joining vigils and marches to protest the presence of ex-Nazis in West German courts and universities during the 1960's.

That morning, the local daily paper had again been filled with readers' letters about the Goldhagen book and Germany's ''guilt'' and ''responsibility.'' At one point the woman looked up from the paper and cried: ''For heaven's sake, when will the preaching end? The Nazis are dead! How long will they remind us of these horrors? It's just too awful!''

Her friend said that just as today's Germans are resolved never again to be perpetrators, today's Jews are resolved never again to be victims. For this reason they will go on reminding themselves and others even at the price of reopening old wounds.

''If there are still Jews in a thousand years, I am sure some will go on to remind you,'' he said. He was immediately sorry for this hyperbole, for she burst into tears: ''In a thousand years? Why? It's too awful!'' He answered: ''Because they are the people of memory. Hundreds of cities must have been sacked and razed in the first century. Only the Jews still speak of the destruction of their Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D.''

A long and painful discussion ensued. Germans are prone to treat the Holocaust as yet another horrible crime of history, like so many others in Stalin's Russia or Pol Pot's Cambodia. Perhaps it is psychologically easier to bear the burden of guilt if others, in Moscow, Phnom Penh or Bosnia-Herzegovina, share in it. By the same token, Jews insist on the unique quality of the crime committed against them. If Germans historicize the crime, Jews are prone to mythologize it. There is a syndrome that could be called the chauvinism of the victim. If the crime is unique, perhaps the pain is easier to bear. It was Goldhagen's contention that a singular crime must have a singular cause that raised so much of the furor. Between the two sides there exists a psychological gulf. Perhaps it can never be bridged.